This thread is for father technologies only. Go post in the gun gal thread if you want to talk about popular milslop.
I started writing this thread before the meetup but I didn’t finish it because I was having trouble trying to say what I want to say. IL-2 is easy to talk about because it’s a flight simulator. Flying a plane has an immediate appeal that I think most people can understand easily. Something like Panzer General I think is harder to understand. you could play 100 other srpgs that largely hit the same notes wthout being married to an aesthetically repulsive setting. And yet, despite thinking military shit is kind of ugly and boring, I have spent most of my life in that world.
I think I started caring about this stuff when I was a child. My dad used to build models of tanks in the early '90s, I guess before he became a total recluse who only plays Call of Duty. I spent hours looking at that tank and the detailed interior inside. He would always get pissed off at me for opening it up. He had a Microsoft Sidewinder seemingly for MechWarrior related reasons but he also had Combat Flight Simulator 2 and MiG Alley and European Air War so that’s how I got into those. IL-2 was all me, I found a copy of it at the store for cheap. My mom didn’t like the idea of me going outside like ever so I spent pretty much my entire childhood and most of my adolescence in one room when I wasn’t being escorted around by my parents. I was extremely autistic and barely talked so I guess I channeled all that model energy into building my own. I’d use like die cast tanks and planes and army men and shit to create these huge dioramas that would take up an entire room. Everyone thought it was really cute but I don’t know, I think if it was my kid I would be like hey all you do is build giant battlefields everywhere are you okay? Instead I got the discount DC Sniper “Dad has you play Ghost Recon” treatment and digging fucking foxholes in the backyard cuz we watched Band of Brothers. It’s practice you know. For when the UN blue helmeted fascists are swarming all over the fucking Piggly Wiggly.
I was an insatiable reader from like pretty much the second I was conscious enough to understand what a book was, my dad had all kinds of history books around, and I didn’t get a computer in my little room until 3rd grade. The first book I ever read was Rainbow Six. One of the books I remember reading incessantly as a child was “The Cult of Counterterrorism: The ‘Weird World’ of Spooks, Counterterrorists, Adventurers, and the Not-Quite Professionals” by Neil C. Livingstone. I read this book in 2003 but it is from 1991 and thus managed to avoid being a War on Terror polemic, instead focusing on like the weird consumer culture of GADDAFI DUCK and Bart Simpson desert storm shirts? There’s a whole section about Soldier of Fortune magazine that basically made it sound like the most psychotic thing ever. There’s like a chapter where he talks about security theater and people giving up their freedom over the perceived threat of terrorism (he does the usual “more people die from lightning strikes than terrorism” shit which rocks) and there is an MSNBC documentary from 2002 where they show footage of him in summer 2001 predicting 9/11. Honestly when you put all this out there it kind of explains everything about why I ended up this way.
There is a strange beauty to a game like Combat Mission: Beyond Overlord. It has these very chibi graphics because it’s from 2000 that almost hide the fact that it’s an incredibly complicated game. Sometimes I wonder why they don’t make more wargames with a similar art style, it makes you care about your pixeltruppen more. It’s with regret in my heart I inform the audience that this game looks like this purely out of technical constraints. The second generation of CM games are washed out, more interested in “realism,” and run like total shit. It’s really funny to think about but the developers have recently announced that they’re switching to this hot new engine called Unity. So we’ll see how that goes.
WW2 real time strategy games were definitely on trend in the early 2000s but it took a while for them to wrap around to anything approximating genuinely interesting gameplay, somehow. Before this you had to go into the world of DOS gaming to pull out 2D stuff like V for Victory and Close Combat (both by Atomic Games. a good chunk of the staff would go on to form famous PC wargame developer TalonSoft where John Tiller worked until about 1996 and the rest would go on to make Six Days in Fallujah. lol.) So much of computer wargaming comes out of the Avalon Hill game Squad Leader, Close Combat was an attempt to make a computerized SL game that they abandoned, Combat Mission began as an official Avalon Hill PC Squad Leader game. I’m not an expert on the topic of Squad Leader because I kind of suck at it (this will be an aside later sorry) but my understanding is that a guy in the late 70s wanted to make a boardgame that seriously attempted to simulate the realities of infantry combat and that is what we got. Grognards fucking love SL/ASL. Its design lineage shows in basically every platoon or company level wargame ever made.
Squad Leader is not a game about perfect precise control over other humans. Squad Leader is a game where you have anywhere from a platoon (two to four squads usually) to a company (multiple platoons) sized element and all you can do is pass orders to your commanders, wait for your men to process these orders, and then hope they don’t fall apart under fire. Combat Mission works largely the same way, but as it’s a computer game it doesn’t have play out in abstract phases; Close Combat is a little different because it simulates the men on an individual level instead of a squad level. You can notice at the start of any given turn that your units don’t begin doing what you’ve told them right away. The further away any given unit is from their commanding officer, the longer it takes for them to receive your orders. On top of this, your men get scared, they get tired, they surrender, they run away. You can tell them to sprint into machine gun fire, but the odds of it actually happening are minuscule. So this is where real life tactics come in. find fix flank finish, fire and manuever, etc, all that shit works in wargames usually. I don’t need games to be hyper realistic but I like when I can think of something based on the rules presented to me and it works. That might sound pretty standard but you would be surprised at how annoyed most games make me in this regard.
I stop playing a lot of more recent games when I get to the part where they expect you to keep riding on the gameplay loop or whatever and then I never finish them. But I’ll do a search pattern in Silent Hunter 4 for like six real hours and not give a shit. Wargames and simulators are constantly challenging in a way that I find lacking in a lot of other games. Air to air combat in IL-2 occurs at such speed that you must always be paying attention. When it takes 15 real minutes to fly to the area it’s getting you ready to do the job. Same with the search patterns. It might take me 8 hours of gameplay to actually run into something worth shooting at, but it creates a form of mental preparation that puts me in a state where I want to do the geometry to plot a firing solution or whatever. I think the reason this and not AAA slop works on me psychologically is because it’s not a dopamine slot machine like fucking Forza Horizon or whatever. It’s doing something real and doing it well. Because of wargames’ boardgame lineage and simulators being boutique I think these games can get away with evading modern game design almost entirely.
One of my favorite memories of a flight sim is doing a scenario in Strike Fighters 2 where I was in a Cuban Air Force MiG-15 fighting off a US invasion of the country. Operation Tainted Cigar, which sounds exactly like some dumb bullshit the US Army would come up with. I knew from experience and reading about it that the F-4 Phantoms the adversary were using only had a load of 2-4 missiles, and no gun. The MiG-15’s primary armament is a gun. On this particular day there were heavy thunderclouds over Havana. As I’m making out of a takeoff and into the scramble I begin to put this together. A thing about jets is that it’s a highly overwhelming auditory experience. The plane communicates with you using different tones. Often times in pitched battle these tones form a droning soundtrack that basically blocks out everything else in your mind. I sort of understand why they added a woman’s voice into it later. I spent 45 actual minutes baiting the F-4s into firing at me, fleeing the second the drone became more urgent into the dark clouds to lose them and their missiles. Every time I dodged one I felt a huge burst of relief, the tone would shift down again, and I’d do this until they were out of missiles. Then I would soar back out of the clouds and curve around, then hunt them down from behind with my altitude advantage as they tried to retreat to Florida. I shot down like 11 enemy planes before I ran out of ammunition. It’s great that these are games where outside knowledge can help you. I’ve read what’s probably an embarrassing amount of skipper memoirs and books about torpedoes and old manuals for deflection shooting and it has all unironically made me better at these games. It’s like classical gamefaqs when you read some kriegsmarine dude’s memoir, he’s talking in depth about how he would approach a merchant convoy, you recreate his strategy move for move, and then it actually works.
I’m starting to lose my point I think but the final aspect of these games I enjoy is the historical aspect. I’m genuinely fascinated to witness the perception of history. You can learn a lot about the designer based on how they interpret historical events. There are many famous examples of…bias, to put it politely, in these games, and I feel there’s a value in at least being able to conceptualize the way these people are wrong. You might be bored of hearing about the second world war, and that’s justifiable, but I promise it still matters. There’s a narrative of history almost all of you have been exposed to about the efficacy of blitzkrieg as a tactic and how super all the Nazi tanks were. It’s like a load bearing part of American mythology about the war, and admiration for these tactics is literally built into NATO today. Did you know America’s official historian of the Wehrmacht during the war was a CIA-aligned Nazi who used the opportunity to make them sound more badass and sanitize their participation in war crimes? And like every major American institution referred to this guy’s work until the late 1980s? When you keep this shit in mind it doesn’t take very long to notice that there’s a glut of Axis content compared to literally everything else. And yes, I could pretend to credulously not understand this and write a big post wondering why everyone thinks the Nazis are cool. Instead I will try to illustrate this ahistoricism through example.
When any military does a tabletop wargame or a field exercise, these scenarios are built in such a way that the person playing them has all the tools to succeed, they are expressly designed to be winnable. So if a major fails his company-wide exercise we know it’s his fault, because the people who planned the game know it’s an achievable scenario. When you start to design scenarios on a larger scale, you can’t pin failures on a single individual or company anymore because you start to run into an issue where it’s possible the objective just isn’t achievable realistically. But those results are counter to policy, they are counter to common belief, they are bad for morale. So you start designing the exercises around policy instead. The President says Taiwan is defensible, so it must be. He says invading Iran is attainable, and so it must be.
It’s the exact same thing that leads to 80 scenarios about SS panzer divisions and 0 about the fully modeled Free French, Canadian, or Polish Troops in Combat Mission Fortress Italy. The designers of the average grog game are working backwards from “I think the Nazis had badass tanks” “I think they were really smart and cool and good at war” “The Allies only won because there were so many of them!” so the games reflect that. That is the accepted policy, no questioning it. Everyone acts like it’s a mystery why the Nazis lost cuz they’re just so good at this shit. Panzer Corps 2 is a great example of this; there are like, three Allied DLCs and then a whole 1936-1946 DLC series for the Nazis where you can win the war and invade America and hang out with Rommel’s son and see a Tiger tank lustfully open her kimono for you. In reality a Tiger couldn’t drive more than a kilometer without sinking into the ground, detracking, or having its engine explode. The Nazis were able to sweep through the Low Countries in 1940 because the French commanders were too hesitant to cut off and pocket the ridiculously overstretched advances of the Wehrmacht, too reliant on the Maginot Line that was largely bypassed. And, of course, the Allies are the guys who actually ended up fucking winning.
In short:
